“I don’t need you to protect me. I’m just saying, he’s your friend.”
“Here, hand me the bullet. I’ll try first.” Marcus held out his other hand, and I put the bullet in it. “Now what?” he asked.
“Now you wish it gone, or safe, or whatever.” Marcus’s face took on a look of concentration.
Nothing happened.
He closed his eyes, and rolled his shoulders, and wrinkled his forehead, but still nothing happened. The Frisbee stayed right there in his hand.
“I can’t do it.” He opened his eyes and looked at me. “Your turn,” he said, holding the Frisbee and the bullet out to me.
I curled my fingers around the thrumming bullet, gripped the Frisbee with my ghost hand, and wished it gone.
And it disappeared.
“What the—?” shouted Jason from somewhere across camp, the last words drowned out by a blast of gunfire that made me jump toward Marcus.
“Holy shit!” I said, laughing and tumbling into his arms. “He shot it.”
Marcus was laughing too, both of us holding our sides and trying to keep quiet because somewhere out there was a pissed off Jason with a loaded gun.
“What the hell is going on?” Jason’s voice boomed, getting closer to the tent.
“I’ll take care of him,” Marcus said, crossing to the door. “You keep experimenting, and I’ll watch what happens on the other end. See if you can send a Frisbee somewhere else. See if you can send more than one at a time,” and then he was gone, leaving me alone with a stack of Frisbees and Jason’s bullet.
* * *
After an hour of Frisbee bulleting, we’d learned this: The bullet only sent things to Jason, not to anyone else, or to any other thing or landmark. No matter how hard I tried, or what I thought of, the Frisbees went to Jason every time, landing about two or three feet directly in front of him. Marcus had even tried standing where the Frisbee usually appeared, and it had simply appeared directly beside him.
I could send more than one. In fact, I could send as many as I could hold, as long as I was touching them, or touching one that was touching the rest. I could hold them with my flesh hand, or my ghost hand, or hold the bullet in either. It didn’t make a difference.
And the bullet only worked if it was on my person. If it was in my pocket, or boot, or bra, that was fine, as long as it was touching something that was touching my skin. But any further away from me than that, and nothing happened. I thought that might have something to do with the vibrations—that it had to feel me, and I had to feel it, in order for it to work.
When Marcus finally returned to the tent, arms full of Frisbees, I had to ask him, “So what did Jason think of that? And the other guys? Did it freak them out?”
“It’s something we can use, an advantage,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what they think.”
“But they still think it’s my hand doing it? Shouldn’t we tell them about the bullet?”
“Not yet,” he said. “I need them focused on this rescue. Even though we can’t use the bullet to zap Emma out of there from a distance, we may still be able to make it work for us.”
“What if we kept Jason back, somewhere a safe distance away? If I could get close enough to Emma, I could bullet her out to him.”
“It’s too risky,” Marcus said. “Besides, Jason is our best marksman. He grew up around guns, carrying them, loading them, cleaning them. If it comes down to firepower, we’ll need him close.”
“What about Nose? He has a gun.”
“I think it would be more accurate to say Nose
carries
a gun. He barely knows how to use it. We got both our guns out of a pick-up truck as we were leaving the CAMFer game preserve. We’ve all been practicing since, and Nose is a better shot than I am, but that isn’t saying much.”
“Yale’s no good?”
“He doesn’t like guns,” Marcus said. “But I have him working up a homemade tazer as we speak. It’s not lethal, and it only works at close range, but it’s better than nothing. He can make you one, if you want, or we have a couple of knives.”
“No,” I said. I didn’t think I could ever shoot someone, let alone stab them. And I’d seen videos of tasing on the internet. “I don’t want a weapon.”
“Well, you’ll have the bullet and your hand,” he said.
I came armed and dangerous. That’s what he meant. Whatever I’d done to Mike Palmer hadn’t exactly been the work of a committed pacifist. But I wouldn’t do anything like that again. I couldn’t.
“They won’t shoot to kill,” Marcus said, as if that was comforting.
“You mean like Palmer didn’t.”
“He was an idiot. And it wasn’t fatal,” he pointed out, that old smirk playing around his lips.
“Easy for you to say,” I glared at him “You can’t die.”
“Actually, the exact opposite,” he protested. “You might have noticed I have this annoying habit of dying on a regular basis.”
“How many times have you died and come back?”
He stared at me, blinking.
“Come on, how many times?”
“Since you’ve known me?” he asked, stalling.
“No, not since I’ve know you. Since you were born. How many times have you died in your lifetime?”
“A lot,” he said, rushing on, “but that doesn’t make me immortal. I’m hard to kill, especially if you go for my major organs, but I can still be killed.”
“Is that supposed to be comforting?” I asked, feeling the panic rise in me once again. What were we doing? What were we thinking? We were just a bunch of teenagers who barely knew how to use guns. I couldn’t ask them to do this.
“We’re going to get Emma out,” Marcus said, cradling my hands in his, boring into me with those wonderful brown eyes. “And no one is going to die.”
“You promise?”
“Yes,” he said, his voice rough with conviction. “I promise.”
“So how do we do it?” I asked, taking a deep breath.
“First, you show me Palmer’s house,” he said, turning and unfolding his map of Greenfield across the table. “And then we figure that out.”
* * *
The hike into town was almost too easy. Apparently, not only had I recovered from my injuries, I was also getting in shape.
Palmer’s house sat directly across the street from Webster Park, an overgrown, undeveloped piece of land Gregory Webster had donated to the Greenfield Town Council the year before. There couldn’t have been a better location for us to hide and recon the house if we’d designed it ourselves.
At the edge of the park, Jason scouted out a sycamore tree that still had most of its leaves, its stair-step branches making it easy for us to climb, and we each picked a solid branch to sit on.
Jason took the highest perch, one branch above me, his rifle strapped to his back. He got out his binoculars to scan Palmer’s house.
Marcus sat on a branch across from mine, level with me, Palmer’s gun at his hip, and when I caught his eye, he winked, smiling.
Yale and Nose were silent a few branches below. Nose hefted the third gun and Yale had his homemade tazer tucked away somewhere.
Then we just sat there, waiting, the autumn sun sinking down between the branches of our tree like a very slow clock.
After about twenty minutes, my butt fell asleep, and the rest of me was not far behind it. I kept nodding off, my body jerking away from the falling edge of sleep every few minutes.
Marcus dug a pen and some scraps of paper out of his pack and started passing me notes. Just little stupid things like, “You’re a cute narcoleptic.” or “I want to have your babies.” They were keeping me awake, but they were also making me giggle. Jason kept frowning at us like a study hall teacher, so after I’d written back, “Babies are evil,” Marcus grinned and nodded, but he didn’t send anymore.
I was just repositioning myself on my oh-so-comfy branch when Emma’s phone began vibrating in my pocket.
Marcus stared at me.
I frantically dug it out while trying to maintain my balance. I looked down at the screen.
The call was from Emma’s new number.
It buzzed again.
I looked across at Marcus.
“Give it to me,” he said, holding out his hand.
Instead, I jabbed the answer button and put the phone to my ear. “Hello?”
“If you want to see your friend alive again,” said the Dark Man in his strangely accented voice, “I’ll need to speak to David.”
THIS IS DAVID
“What?—David isn’t here,” I stammered.
“Let me talk to David,” the Dark Man insisted, as if he hadn’t heard me.
“Let me talk to Emma,” I demanded back, cold realization flooding my body. Somehow the Dark Man thought I was with David. He was expecting to talk to David.
“Hand me the phone,” Marcus said, next to me. He’d moved to my branch, and I hadn’t even been aware of it.
“Let me talk to Emma so I know she’s alive,” I said into the phone.
“You have two minutes to put David on, or she won’t be,” the Dark Man replied.
“No. Listen. David isn’t here. I’ve never even met him.”
“Olivia, let me have the phone,” Marcus ordered, trying to pull it from my ear.
“Let go of me,” I shoved his hands away. “Please,” I begged the Dark Man, “don’t hurt her. She doesn’t know anything.”
“You have one minute remaining,” the Dark Man said.
“Olivia,” Marcus insisted, this time actually prying the phone out of my hand. He put it to his ear, looking at me, his eyes pleading for something. I had no idea what.
“This is David,” he said.
This is David
.
I stared at him, watched the lines of his face change as he listened to whatever the Dark Man was saying. The truth was written in his eyes like it had never been before. This was not some lie to save Emma or buy us time.
This is David
. Not Marcus.
David
. He was David. Had always been David, the one who’d been captured by the CAMFers and barely escaped with his life. He’d seen the list with his own name on it. It was my Marcus who’d grown up in the foster care system, and been turned over to the CAMFers by the police, and didn’t trust anyone. David hadn’t disappeared again; he’d just become someone else.
I glanced up at Jason and saw the weird mixture of hurt and resignation melding in his eyes. He hadn’t known either. Nose looked stunned too, but not Yale. When I looked at him he looked away. He had been with Marcus—or did I call him David now?—from almost the beginning. Yale had known Marcus was lying to the rest of us all this time. And if Marcus had lied about his PSS and his identity, what else had he lied about?
“No, that’s not—” Marcus-now-David said into the phone, his voice strained.
He listened for a moment, his face tense, and I was close enough to hear the sinuous rise and fall of the Dark Man’s voice, though I couldn’t make out the words.
“You don’t need or want her,” Marcus said calmly, firmly, “and we both know it.”
I couldn’t think of him as David. He was Marcus to me, and I couldn’t just suddenly turn that off. “Let her go,” he was saying into the phone. “She’s useless to you.”
More listening. Pain flickering across his face, then pure fury. “Fuck you!” he screamed into the phone, a vein bulging in his forehead.
I tried to reach out and take the phone back, but he turned, blocking my grab. He was losing it. He was going to get Emma killed.
“No!” he said, more calmly, though barely. “You don’t need them. This is between you and me. No one else.”
Another short pause, while I sat numbly next to him in a tree.
“That’s not going to happen, and you know it,” he said.
The Dark Man replied. Short. One sentence.
“No, don’t—” Marcus said, pulling the phone from his ear and raising it in his fist as if he was going to smash it against the sycamore’s trunk.
I caught hold of his hand, restraining him.
“He hung up,” he said, releasing the phone back to me.
“What about Emma?” I asked, staring down at it. “What did he say about Emma?”
“She’s—alive. For now.” Marcus seemed stunned.
“For now? What does that mean? What did he want? What did he ask for?”
“He said we have two hours to turn ourselves in or he kills her.” Marcus looked around, as if he’d just realized where he was and what he’d said.
“Nooo,” I heard myself moan. He’d promised me this wouldn’t happen, that they wouldn’t hurt Emma. I wanted to scream it at him, throw his words back in his face, but what good would that do? Obviously, he lied about everything.
“So, he knows about all of us?” Nose asked.
Marcus nodded.
“And he knows we’re out here?” Jason asked.
“No,” Marcus said, a glimmer of hope flickering in his eyes. “If he’d known that, he wouldn’t have given us so much time. And he would have gloated about it. Tried to use it to psych us out. He must think we’re still back at camp.”
“You know this guy.” Nose said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah,” Marcus answered, “I know him. He’s the bastard that killed my sister.”
“What?” The word came from all directions.
“My sister, Danielle.” Marcus said. “We grew up in the system together. No one wanted one PSS kid, let alone a pair, so they split us up. And every time they did, we’d run away, and find each other, and get caught by the cops. The last time they nailed us, the cop didn’t take us back to the station, or to our case worker, or to the group home. He took us to this CAMFer compound out in the woods. Sold us out for a wad of cash, and handed us over to that psycho in there for extraction. And then he killed her.”
“The Dark Man killed your sister,” I said. I had almost forgotten the picture I’d found in Marcus’s keepsake box that first day at camp. The picture of him and his sister.
“Yes,” Marcus said, “but he was calling himself Dr. Julian then. And he had a different accent. He changes identities the way other people change clothes.”
If the Dark Man had killed his sister, how could Marcus have believed that Emma would be safe? He hadn’t, I reminded myself. He’d been lying. About everything. He’d lied with his words. With his hands. With his lips. What had he said?
This isn’t a game to me.
Lies. All lies.
“If this CAMFer killed your sister,” Jason said calmly, “then I say we go in there right now and finish this.”